The Feminist Version of Beauty and the Beast
Like mostly any written text, this story can be interpreted, from a psychoanalytical perspective. I have chosen these two perspectives-psychoanalytical and feminist approaches because I find that the chosen text does lend itself to such analysis. First and foremost, there are some elements in the text that psychoanalysts would certainly take into account and would be willing to interpret, and secondly, since the story is written by a feminist, it must contain some typically feminist aspects and elements that could be interesting to study here.
The psychoanalytical approach applied to this text may take several directions: one can either analyze the author, the characters, or the content of the story itself. I will refer here mostly to the psychoanalysis of the characters and of some relevant elements that can be found in the story.
As psychoanalytical theory affirms, in the growing-up process, the child keeps on to his/her imaginary identification with objects, and that is how his/her ego is slowly built up; in fact, the girl firstly identifies herself with the white rose she asks for her father to bring her upon his return home. The white rose is a clear symbol of purity, virginity, femininity, but also of matrimony.
There are also some other elements at the beginning of the text which stress this idea of marriage, or of wedding, to be more specific. The author indeed mentions the existence of snow, and then the image gets crystal clear: "the road is white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin." We are given clear allusions to the young girl's purity and also that she has reached a marriageable age.
As it has been previously mentioned, what we can notice about her is her tendency to identify herself with exterior elements. She seems in search of her true self. First she identifies herself with the symbolically-charged white rose, than we are told about her newly-discovered pleasure of looking into the mirror. In this way, her ego gets more and more developed, she becomes more and more self-conscious. Freud might have said in this case that the young girl shows signs of auto-eroticism, that she takes erotic pleasure in her own body. And by looking into the mirror all the time, her exterior beauty causes her to become a bit vain and self-centered, and to forget about the promise she had made to the Beast, that of returning to him after the end of the winter. She may be said to suffer, at least temporary, from the "delusions of grandeur" Freud once mentioned. Yet she manages to escape this, we could say that she is cured at the moment when the spaniel arrives to inform her of its master's, the Beast's, tragic state, and when she thus manages to escape from her egotistic prison, she succeeds in becoming aware of the other.
From the same psychoanalytical point of view, we could say that she does suffer from the so-much-discussed Oedipus complex. The mother is absent in this story, and neither is there any mentioning of her whatsoever. The Father, the representative of the Law follows the principle of "sexual division of labor." He is the bread-winner, the business man who has to provide himself and his only daughter financial support. Beauty has a rather passive role in this respect, at least at the beginning of the story-she merely stays home, waiting for her father to return and bring her the desired white rose. Her other role is to ensure the emotional "maintenance" of the family. She is "both 'inside' and 'outside' male society, both a romantically idealized member of it and a victimized outcast. She is sometimes what stands between man and chaos."
This latter assumption, the fact that woman stands between man and chaos, is most obvious at a certain instant of the story, after Beauty's leaving Mr. Lyon, with the promise to return to him, the "Beast" becomes victim of such chaos: not only he gets seriously ill, but also his luxurious dwelling place gets extremely untidy and looks rather poor. So, the woman is the one who can restore the disturbed order, since she was the one to initially have broken into this order.
